We live in a turbulent, unpredictable world. Few things feel certain. But there are some truths we can hold fast to. The sun will rise. We’ll grow older each day. And the media will bend over backward to celebrate US imperialism.

For evidence of this, just review the past week’s coverage of President Donald Trump’s illegal abduction and overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Once the kidnapping operation swung into gear, our most prominent newsrooms obediently adopted their time-honored patterns: indulging war lust, sidestepping or downplaying the rule of law, and uncritically cheerleading yet another violent foreign intervention by the US military.

A full accounting of the crimes against journalism arising from this jingoistic outlook would fill a lengthy book. In lieu of that, let’s simply review a few of the most notable lowlights from a dreadful week of media coverage of the Venezuela coup.

Let’s start with the weaselly euphemism for kidnapping that instantly spread across the mediasphere: “captured.” Virtually every major news outlet initially covered the Maduro news in exactly the same way: by saying that the United States had “captured” the Venezuelan leader.

But “captured” is a term you use for someone who is wanted as part of a legitimate legal process. It’s what you say about a criminal on the run. It is not a term that has any coherent meaning when one country’s military violently attacks another country, illegally seizes its president on grounds that are widely deemed to be spurious, flies him out of the country, and imprisons him. The word for that is “kidnapping.” By saying the US had “captured” Maduro, these outlets were framing the story in exactly the way Trump preferred. The BBC even banned its staff from saying Maduro had been kidnapped, according to an internal memo leaked to journalist Owen Jones. Ordering your reporters not to tell the truth: a bold new direction in journalism.

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After the euphemizing came the rationalizing from the punditocracy. The New York Times opinion section gets more attention, but it always pays to tune into what The Washington Post has to say, because perhaps no newspaper besides The Wall Street Journal publishes weird warmongering nonsense more often. That tradition predated owner Jeff Bezos’s directive to tranform the section into a series of valentines to his fellow oligarchs. Still, Bezos’s lackeys on the Post’s editorial board managed to cough out a herogram to Trump that would have made the most dedicated propagandist blush, under the hallucinogenic headline “Justice in Venezuela” (my emphases):

Millions of people around the world, most of all in Venezuela, are celebrating the downfall of the dictator Nicolás Maduro. President Donald Trump’s decision to capture him on Saturday is one of the boldest moves a president has made in years, and the operation was an unquestionable tactical success.

[…]This is a major victory for American interests. Just hours before, supportive Chinese officials held a chummy meeting with Maduro, who had also been propped up by Russia, Cuba and Iran. No doubt millions of Venezuelans will remember who backed their oppressor and who effected his removal. The end of Maduro will be a failure if it doesn’t also corrode the influence of American adversaries in this hemisphere.

Maduro’s removal also sends an important message to tinpot dictators in Latin America and the world: Trump follows through.

In other words, all hail our heroic leader for “following through” on his illegal murders in the Caribbean with an illegal coup! And be on your guard, American adversaries in our hemisphere: Trump is going to corrode you!

In saner journalistic organizations, this shameful bootlicking might have been confined to unsigned editorials. Not so for Bezos’s Post, it seems, which peddled the same talking points, using much of the same phrasing, in its news coverage. Here is how the Post’s Sunday story on the coup began (again, emphasis mine):

The Trump administration’s bold operation to capture strongman Nicolás Maduro from his home in Venezuela was a startling tactical success. But as the smoke clears in Caracas a day after President Donald Trump said triumphantly that the United States would now “run” Venezuela, the reality of how Washington will administer that country in the weeks and months ahead appears uncertain and stubbornly complex.

Not satisfied with duplicating White House press releases (and Post editorials, which now amount to the same thing), the piece goes on to sneer that “Maduro’s allies in Caracas are still in power, some defiantly haranguing about U.S. ‘imperialism.’” The scare quotes around “imperialism” speak volumes. Trump overthrew another country’s leader, vowed to seize that country’s oil wealth, and then proclaimed that he was working in the tradition of the Monroe Doctrine, the most famous assertion of imperial hegemony in US history. Yet, as was the case for the BBC’s executives, the editors of the Post have evidently decided journalists are no longer obliged to call things by their true names.

It is, perhaps, a small virtue that these bloodthirsty diatribes don’t even pretend to be skeptical about Trump’s thuggery. By contrast, the effort to air procedural objections to the US-orchestrated coup teems with bad faith—particularly at The New York Times, the house organ of whatever remains of establishment liberalism. Predictably, the opinion shop at the paper of record has run a series of chest-thumping defenses of the Venezuela coup, including a lengthy interview with Elliott Abrams, one of the top American war criminals of the past 45 years. Yet what’s most revealing here are the efforts to “balance” such outbursts. The Times’ lead exercise in chin-stroking dissent was written by Joe Biden’s former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, along with Sullivan’s former deputy Jon Finer. Sullivan, you may recall, was one of the central architects of the Biden policy to fund, arm, and support Israel’s genocide in Gaza. By all rights, he should be standing trial at The Hague. Instead, he gets to drone on in The New York Times about sensible foreign policy choices.

The piece itself is a relatively standard bit of Democratic Party brow-furrowing. “We support the judicious use of force when it is necessary to keep the country safe, it has the informed consent of the American people and all other options have been exhausted,” Sullivan and Finer write. “Mr. Trump is demonstrating a profoundly different and dangerous approach.”

Yes, quite, indeed, whatever. But read on: “He is willing to use force—and risk the lives of American soldiers—for increasingly flamboyant expressions of strength abroad.” Sorry, but nobody who abetted a literal genocide for nearly two years gets to lecture anyone else about “flamboyant violence.” The fact that Sullivan has carte blanche to pose as a wise and judicious thinker in the most important news outlet in America is a symbol of everything that is rotten to the core about our elite media—and a reminder that, for so many of these institutions, having an endless body count is a selling point, not a moral outrage

No litany of media crimes committed in the wake of the Venezuela coup would be complete without Bari Weiss’s Trump-worshiping operation at CBS News. I have seen many embarrassing moments of TV news in my time. But I can’t think of a more mortifying, humiliating, cringeworthy 60 seconds than the recent handiwork of Tony Dokoupil, Weiss’s handpicked new anchor of the CBS Evening News. Dokoupil wasted no time in showcasing the qualities that endeared him so much to Weiss—namely, the ability to cheerfully debase himself on national television in service of the Trump administration.

Dokoupil became instantly notorious for his Pravda-style segment doting on the world-historical awesomeness of Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio—a performance so dire that it even drew criticism from the media beat’s best-known boardroom stenographer, Dylan Byers. Here’s a partial transcript of Dokoupil’s glorified mash note, with some editorial asides:

Finally tonight, and only in America [editor’s note: pretty sure “fascist is employed” is something that can happen in other countries, but whatever], the many lives and many jobs of Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a former Florida senator. He’s now the face of US foreign policy and President Trump’s point man on Venezuela, all in addition to his roles as secretary of state, interim national security adviser and acting national archivist and USAID chief. Whatever you think of his politics, you got to admit it’s an impressive résumé [no, actually, you don’t—the proliferation of grandiose job titles is a well known tic of fascist government. Also, it doesn’t matter how many job titles you possess if, like Rubio, you perform terribly in all of them].…

[F]or Rubio’s hometown fans, which are many around here in Miami, it is a sign of how Florida, once an American punchline, has become a leader on the world stage [in reality, Rubio, who, by the way, had family connections to the hemisphere’s drug trade, is Exhibit A for anyone treating the Sunshine State as a punch line].

Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida man.

“Marco Rubio, we salute you.” I feel unclean just thinking about that sentence. But alas, the utter defilement of CBS News is the logical culmination of a week’s worth of mainstream press coverage that has transformed Trump’s unhinged raid into a sterling example of sober American peace-keeping. Next up: Face the Nation, with new man-of-the-people host Stephen Miller.